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Tom's Hardware Reviews VIA Mini-ITX Board
SlightlyMadman writes "Tom's Hardware has finally taken notice of the popular Mini ITX form factor, in this article. Sounds like these are the way to go for a new PC, so long as you don't have a deathmatch scheduled anytime soon." While the form factor on these boards are great, one gives up a lot in the way of ability to upgrade, since many parts are now soldered onto the motherboard.
I hadn't heard about this form factor before, but a quick search on newegg.com shows that it's incredibly cheap! A VIA motherboard with a 1Ghz processor is only 170 something bucks!! Add 40-50$ for memory, 80$ for a decent sized hard drive, and 50-100$ for a case, and you have a complete and small computer. I'm thinking that you add a small lcd screen and a remote control (stick the IR receiver on the front of the case), and this is a perfect and incredibly cheap divx/mp3 player, connected to a TV and stereo system.
Maan
See http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/index.php for more details.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
For the record, you CAN get hardware acceleration under Linux with the built-in Trident chipset--it's not the normal trident.c driver in the kernel. Here's a link (no guarantees, it's Geocities):
http://www.geocities.com/jagasian/
I personally own five mini-itx systems, and I've purchased about another 20 for my firm. Up until this past month, we didn't have the space to install real rack servers, so I started buying Epia 800 boards and Cubid 2677R cases--they're tiny, low power, and not very noticable, and more than fast enough for a firewall, mail server, web server, what-have-you. And they look a lot sexier lying around the office.
We also use them for forensic work. Put an IDE controller in the PCI slot, and you can pack the entire machine, plus an LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse, into a breifcase-sized Pelican case. Pack a few extra PCI cards (SCSI, FW, MFM/RLL controller) and you can access just about any hard drive ever made. Many's the time we've made our reputation by being on the scene in hours, fully prepared and able to do a drive acquisition, for a job that the competition needed two days to prepare for. Clients eat that shit up.
Basically, you haven't lived until you've had a really portable system with actual PCI slots. I have a laptop, but this is a whole 'nother ball game.
I value very quiet computers so I use a 533Mhz EPIA (passively cooled) as my main workstation.
The case is a Chyang Fun cube, with the power supply replaced with a 60W DC->DC one. Instead of a hard drive I use a compact flash to boot an OpenBSD diskless kernel and then onwards everything is over the network to my disk server in the other room. Since the compact flash is only read for the kernel and never written to it shoulnd't die too quickly.
Result? No moving parts and therefore dead silent. It's very nice. All works fine under OpenBSD although I'm using a Matrox G200 for the graphics rather than what's on-board so I can't comment on that.
In the UK you can get this stuff from Ultim8PC and LinITX.
Arguable on ALL points. The Mini-ITX Spec dictates that the mobo can't use more than like 25 watts. In many cases, a 50-70 watt PSU is MORE than enough. Laptops may use less, but you don't buy laptops because they use very little power (in most cases) you buy them because they're portable. This is NOT meant to be as portable as a laptop. Plus, a Mini-ITX system can be run COMPLETELY Fanless. Try doing that with most laptops of the same speed. Laptops aren't THAT much smaller for the price increase, and you can only get a laptop capable of doing video/audio for $150 if you enjoy compressing video to 50x50 at 10k/s (not really, but you get the point.) For $300, you can have a computer that will play all your music, and movies WITHOUT recompressing them, and have more space to store them, to boot.
if all you use your computer for
When I was a kid my parents had a radio in every room of the house. I could never workout why. These things didn't even have stereo, or seperate speakers - just small cheap portable transistor radios (which were never "ported"). Whereas the sound system in my bedroom was a really "power-user" system. Worth more than all the other electrical equipment in the house combined. I always promised that when I could afford it I would build myself the ultimate sound system.
But now I could afford such a thing I find that all really I need is a radio in every room of the house.
Fairly soon I'll also have a computer for every room in the house - and I've got a BIG house. When my son grows-up he'll likely think I'm mad - as his PC will likely blow the pants off all of my computers - combined. Much in the same way you think anyone interested in these ITX boards must be mad. But I'm not mad, I've just integrated computers into my life in a slightly different manner than you.
So when you see hardware like this - which isn't designed for your lifestyle - don't knock it. It's mot made for you.
why even bother with Linux
Let's say you found a need for small lowish powered PCs in each room of your house. What would you rather run on it?
Me? I'm sticking to the OS I know and love.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
The extremely low power consumption of the MiniITX boards makes them ideal for running my company's webserver. Compared to the Athlon servers they replaced, they consume a fraction of the power; they should run a lot longer off our large UPS next time there is a power outage.
Performance problems? The low cost has made it easy to purchase more computers, each running specialized tasks. The most mission critical computers get the biggest UPS.